/tmp/lab

It is with great excitement that I am announcing the release of Milkymist 0.3. This release marks a significant milestone for the project: since now, it’s no longer tens of thousands of lines of code for nerds only. It’s also an actual MilkDrop implementation, rendering good-looking visual effects that EVERYBODY can appreciate.

But, see for yourself. If you have a Xilinx ML401 board, grab your JTAG cable and fetch a binary kit from the usual location. See the wiki for setup instructions. Put on some music, turn on random preset selection, and enjoy!

If you don’t have a ML401, here is a video for you to chew on before the Milkymist One boards are available:

(download MP4 file)

On to the technical change log of this release:

• Major TMU redesign (TMU2):
  • Improved performance (2-3 times faster)
  • Rectangular rendering primitive
  • Bilinear texture filtering
  • Texture wrapping
  • Subpixel texture resolution
  • New vertex format
• PFPU modified to support the new TMU vertex format
• Additional MilkDrop features in the demo firmware:
  • More wave modes
  • Borders
  • Motion vectors (experimental)
  • Texture wrapping
  • Random preset chooser
  • Fine-grained decay

If you want to discuss and keep instantly updated about the project, I encourage you to come and idle in the #milkymist channel on the FreeNode IRC network. See this page.

See you there!

In Libro Veritas a publié un livre “La bataille Hadopi” incluant des textes de préstigieux contributeurs comme Jacques Attali, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Alain Lipietz, Jean-Pierre Brard, Martine Billard, Patrick Bloche, Richard M. Stallman, ou même Francis Lalanne, mais aussi avec les contribution du /tmp/lab.

Tous les bénéfices de la vente de ce livre iront financer la campagne de La Quadrature du Net contre HADOPI et pour la liberté sur le Net. Pour ceux qui ne peuvent pas contribuer à cet effort, ce livre de 350 pages est disponible en version PDF.

Le texte intégral est disponible ci-dessous…

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A workshop/coding party will take place at the /tmp/lab in order to finalize the porting of the OpenWrt Linux distribution to the Milkymist open hardware system-on-chip.

Every interested person is welcome.

Venue: http://www.tmplab.org/contact
Date: Monday Dec 21st 2009, starting at 17:00

UPDATE!!!! Because the train that goes to /tmp/lab has suddenly broke down, the event is moved to DigitalNonSense (Paris 17) at 19:00

You certainly know about ipcalc, this simple but pretty utility that enables people to calculate netmasks and IP addresses notations easily? What about ss7calc (download)… Well, to start with, SS7 is even more complicated than IP netmasks. SS7 is the network protocol that enable you to send SMS, to receive calls on your mobile and even to change location while staying on the line. But SS7 “addresses” are not like IP addresses, mainly because they can be coded on 14 or 24 bits. They are called “Point Codes or “Signaling Point Codes”.

Now a new open source project by /tmp/lab member helps you calculate ss7 signaling point codes: http://github.com/philpraxis/ss7calc. Thanks Github. Thanks ipcalc for the model.

There will be a workshop on SS7 hacking at 26C3. Get in touch on /tmp/lab mailing list. If requested, we can do a pre-workshop session at /tmp/lab before.

We are looking for multimedia (mostly graphics) artists for a democompo project. You do not need to have an expert level in programming to participate (if your only contribution is good looking bitmap images, that’s already a lot!), even though a little background is advisable if you want to do animated thingies or some rendered effects (we could help you however).

This mini-project consists in developing a compo on the Milkymist open hardware system-on-chip platform that will present Sanobot, the toxic gas sensor and Twitter bot of /tmp/lab, a hackerspace set up close to a chemical factory.

We look forward to presenting it at demoparties (unfortunately it was not ready for Main#4).

What is a Demoparty:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoparty

More info on Sanobot:

• http://lekernel.net/blog/?p=446 : presentation of the project
• http://lekernel.net/blog/?p=509 : some tech info
• http://lekernel.net/blog/?p=517 : more tech details
• http://lekernel.net/blog/?p=577 : some results
• http://www.twitter.com/sanobot : Twitter feed

More info on Milkymist:

• http://www.milkymist.org : project homepage
• http://www.milkymist.org/doc/paper_overview.pdf : technical overview
• http://www.tmplab.org/wiki/index.php/FPGA_Workshop : workshop on FPGA
  System-on-Chips

Project wiki page (with scenario outline… that you are of course invited
to improve):

• http://www.tmplab.org/wiki/index.php/DemoParty_Compo_with_MilkyMist

So if you think you could design some cool graphics for this project, contact sebastien dot bourdeauducq at lekernel dot net. There is nothing to win, except loads of geek fun, some technical background, and hopefully a demoparty prize

The CSV data from Sanobot for the first half of September is now available here: sanobot_half_sept.csv. Sanobot is the toxic gas sensor and Twitter bot of /tmp/lab.

The first column of the CSV gives the Unix time at which the measurement was taken. The other two columns are the ADC output for respectively the TGS2602 and the TGS2600.

For information about how to interpret the data, see here: http://lekernel.net/blog/?p=509 and http://lekernel.net/blog/?p=517.

Using the full CSV data, we can now try to figure out when is the best time to trigger the Twitter alert. For now, it posts a new alert when one value varies by more than 30% compared to the last posted.

NB. The huge peaks are because of people playing with cigarettes near the sensors. Smoking kills.

We have started experimenting with the air pollution sensors.

First setup:

The Figaro gas sensors mounted on a piece of Veroboard:

View of the big scary Arduino used to plot the first graphs. 1min/div. Looks like it’s working as both smell (from the chemical factory) and measured voltage go up during the third minute:

More to come soon!

Those of you who have been to the /tmp/lab may have experienced the delicate smells of the nearby chemical factory.

We want to learn more about this pollution, so we will implement an automated measurement system.

To monitor the air concentration of pollutants, we use cheap sensors made by a company called Figaro. The models used are TGS2600 and TGS2602; the same are used by the FridaV project. The TGS2600 measures contaminants such as hydrogen and carbon monoxide, while the TGS2602 detects ammonia and hydrogen sulfide (that we think is responsible for the occasional foul smells at the lab).

The outputs of these sensors is digitized and sent to an advanced Arduino called Fonera. It even has 802.11! And it can run Linux! Those features of this Arduino for experts (we hope we will be still able to use it despite our little DIY skills) make it perfect to post automatically the results on the web, by using the popular Twitter for example.

We are thinking about using a SPI analog to digital converter, as the Arduino hardware seems to be able to handle it.

More to come soon, check out the wiki page.

Computer architecture is the science and art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals (Wikipedia).

With the invasion of digital devices during the last decade (cellphones, wireless routers, digital TV…), it has become more than ever ubiquitous.

However, it is still a poorly known subject for most people. Even among the self-proclaimed hardware hacking community, most fanatics of the Arduino development board open source physical computing platform do not know that all the functionality of their much-hyped toy comes from an AVR microcontroller chip that has been being manufactured for years by Atmel. And among those who know, yet fewer people are knowledgeable about the inner working of the AVR microchip; in which computer architecture plays an important role.

The reason behind this might be that during decades, computer architecture was reserved to academic lectures and companies who had enough cash to build integrated circuits costing several hundreds of thousands of dollars. This left little room for the individuals, except those who had the guts to wire together hundreds of logic ICs together. But these amateur systems lag well behind commercial solutions in terms of performance, size, and power consumption.

But today’s falling costs of powerful FPGAs make it possible for individuals to build complete high-performance computer systems (System-on-Chips) from scratch.

This workshop will explore this possibility. After introducing basic computer architecture concepts and practices, we will load a simplified version of the Milkymist System-on-Chip design in the development boards and execute basic programs on it. Then, using Verilog HDL, we will design a simple peripheral for the system-on-chip, integrate it, and test it on the board.

This workshop is for people who want to discover practical computer architecture, and at the same time for those who already know about architecture and want to get an introduction about how to add a peripheral to the open source Milkymist System-on-Chip.

Date: August 29th, 14:00
Venue: /tmp/lab geek collective
Price: Free
Info+Registration: Workshop page

Church of Security opened its temporary chapel last week. Preaching about the over-development of surveillance and the creative space it created for us, believers, who will use Infrared-Blinder for CCTV, Consumer B Gone to prevent highly dangerous terrorist from stealing your shopping cart in the supermarket, RFID detection and activation Crosses and other artifacts during our constant celebration of the all-seeing, all-knowing (yet slow to act) God of Security. Allelujhack!

Don’t miss out the lightning talk we will be giving today at 25C3 on Consumer B Gone !

At approx 12 in Saal 2. More info on these pages :
Consumer B Gone : http://www.tmplab.org/2008/06/18/consumer-b-gone/
Lightning talks : http://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/wiki/Lightning_Talks#Talks_-_Day.234
And for those who are not at the 25C3, there is streaming video : http://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/wiki/Streaming

Consumer B Gone enables you to block a shopping cart by just playing some tones out of your mobile phone speaker as a song or as a ringtone. Consumer B Gone is born from the incredible shock that the shopping cart wheel could be remotely locked if you tried to exit the supermarket parking lot.

The root cause of it was an antenna (a wire in the ground at the exit of the parking lot) which sent a “Lock” signal to 2 of the 4 shopping cart wheels.

If an antenna can do it, I can do it too! The first idea that emerged was to create some hardware to generate such signal… but the hardware didn’t work, so the logic was to test the generated signal against the original signal… and to use a soundcard to record both!

Well… if one soundcard can record, maybe it could be used also to replay??? Replay of course in the adequate coil that serves as an antenna… But hey, wait! What if the coil to be used was the one in the computer’s speaker? Guess what: IT WORKS.

And what about an MP3 File on mobile phones? Guess what again, IT WORKS TOO!!!

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After the BackTrack3 Live SD card for EEE, I continued the distribution exploration with the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) operating system on their brand new XO laptops and their slick and simple GUI called Sugar.

Before jumping into “did this, done that”, current advances in SD card and USB memory sticks sizes, bootable distribution and virtualization take computing to a different level.

Remember when you use to insert a MSDOS diskette into your computer to boot it? Each new operating system could be booted on the same old PC by merely changing the diskette and rebooting? Of course, there were not as many OS as now. This is where the fun begin.

Now, a child can have “his own computer” by just possessing a SD-card. All his changes to his environment will be persistent. He will be able to add programs without depending or affecting anyone. 2 Gb SD card are as cheap as 10 euros now. On such a card, you can have OLPC Sugar, Ubuntu or Debian. And guess what, these are not mutually exclusive. For proof is my experiment by Booting my EEE pc with Xubuntu running Sugar GUI borrowed from standard OLPC / XO distribution. These SD or USB storage are bootable even if they are formatted as VFAT, that means, readable on a standard Windows PC.

On top of this, Kevin’s SD card or USB key may also store a Virtual Machine application (Qemu or Virtual Box are free alternatives to VMware) which may enable him to run his own environment without rebooting daddy’s computer. Such freedom may transform PCs into a commodity where you actually boot your own environment.

Speaking of which, I did some test also running OLPC XO Fedora Core-based distribution in VMware Fusion on my MacBook and it runs nicely, without crashes or else.

In the dark quietness of the lab, using a special lens shaped like the leg of a wine drinking glass, a light source, and a piece of cardboard, we saw the Einstein Ring today. In space, these rings and associated shapes appear when light from distant sources is bent by a massive galaxy or group thereof. Our lens bends light exactly the same way a black hole weighting 75% of Earth mass would. This experiment, and the background about this phenomena are described in details in the paper didactical experiment on gravitational lensing

Here is a Tutorial on how to boot your EEE pc with USB-key or SD-card that I wrote coming back from Indonesia.

The cool thing is that you can have as many 1Gb or 2Gb SD-cards for as many distribution you need to work with. Let’s say you need to use Debian for some compile jobs, Nexenta for some Open Solaris testing and Backtrack3 for some security/hacking jobs? Easy, you just install each of these distribution on a different SD-card (10 euro these days for a 2Gb SD-card) and using one is just as easy as changing disks and rebooting it.

As we are also developping the OLPC France initiative, EEE pc provides an interesting alternative to the XO. Being able to test out the distribution in such a way adds to the “technology fluidity” of such platforms. More to come